Community Groups Protest San Jose’s Crackdown on Homeless Feedings in St. James Park

Volunteers plan to feed the homeless Friday in protest of a city crackdown on un-permitted meal giveaways at St. James Park.

San Jose plans to end food giveaways for the homeless in St. James Park. The announcement earlier this week drew backlash from local activists and religious groups that hand out hundreds of meals a week at the downtown square.

A coalition of faith and community groups will distribute water and granola bars in protest at 1pm Friday, the same day Santa Clara County is expected to release numbers from the latest homeless census.

“It’s taking away our right to be of service to others and help their quality of life,” said Jamie Foberg, of In Their Shoes, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the homeless.

The crackdown comes amid public pressure to clean up St. James Park, said Sandy Perry, head of the Affordable Housing Network of Silicon Valley. Online posts on the Nextdoor community forum urge the city to “sweep the park,” “kick them out” and “take out the trash.”

Perry said that some of the comments call for enacting vagrancy laws or using Rudy Guiliani-style police tactics.

St. James Park has long attracted the city’s homeless population. Its downtown location puts it in proximity to social services, criminal and civil courts and public transit. City officials have urged activists to instead refer the homeless to established nonprofits—such as Loaves and Fishes or the Salvation Army—that provide food and other resources.

“Feeding our homeless must be done in a manner that is consistent and combined with the other wrap-around services that our homeless neighbors need to get back on their feet,” downtown Councilman Raul Peralez wrote in a letter to advocates earlier this week.

He cited health and safety concerns as one of the main reasons to stop the feedings. Later this summer, Peralez said, the San Jose Police Department will start enforcing a municipal code that prohibits distribution of un-permitted food in public parks.

“San Jose Municipal Code (SJMC) 13.33.090 prohibits the distribution of un-permitted food in park spaces,” he wrote. “This ordinance was not designed as a means to deter homeless individuals from parks but rather as a preventative health measure. Although I believe that having food is a human right and the need to provide our homeless neighbors sustenance is a must, I do not think that this is being achieved with the feedings at St. James Park. The feedings are well intentioned, but may not meet health regulations, lack consistency, and accountability if something were to occur to consumers.”

Perry said he suspects that the city’s recent deal to woo Google to downtown has something to do with the ban on homeless meal charity in the park.

“Advocates also suspect that the recent exclusive negotiating agreement with Google is encouraging the city to envision an upscale downtown where the working class, seniors, families with children, and people with disabilities will be banished and have no place,” he said. “The area’s housing and homeless service providers have nowhere near the capacity to serve such a large number of homeless, so the city appears to be embarking on a blame-the-victim approach to drive them out of town.”

Community groups plan to continue handing out food despite the threat of being ticketed.

“We have confidence that the vast majority of San Jose residents do not and will not support persecution of the homeless, and the churches and people of conscience who serve them,” Perry said. “We will not cooperate with any policies intended to rob the people of our city of their human rights and of their dignity as human beings.”

As SJPD’s plan to enforce the anti-feeding ordinance draws criticism, the agency is being praised for a new initiative that helps the homeless. This week, SJPD teamed up with homeless services nonprofit Abode Services to distribute care packages with socks and T-shirts to the unsheltered.

“While police are frequently called to enforce violations involving homeless persons, this is an opportunity for positive interaction and dialogue with law enforcement,” the department wrote on its Facebook page.

The Homeless are part of the public and have every right to use the park. Attempts to drive the homeless out of the park are akin to countries that remove their poor along parade routes etc so that the reality of the issues can be hidden. The homeless in St. James Park are a good reminder to us all that we have a sector of our society that we do not serve well. Everyone has to be somewhere. Feeding the homeless by citizens gives those individuals a chance to share their humanity. A good thing in this age of greed and selfishness.

The right to use a public park is NOT the issue at hand. Camping, occupancy after closing, possession of stolen property, littering, public urination, drug dealing, prostitution, and aggressive pan-handling are not protected rights.

There are ample opportunities to “share in their humanity” without violating the municipal code. Virtually every homeless services group needs volunteers.

They show their greed and selfishness by feeding people in Saint James Park, not in their own community parks. They won’t have anything to do with homeless in Cupertino, Saratoga, Campbell, or Los Gatos.

I find it interesting the list of nonprofits that are making millions off the homeless aren’t part of these conversations. How about destination home, who is supposed to be the lead advocate on homeless issues, where are they on this issue. Do your Job nonprofits and stop creating more nonprofit jobs off the backs of the homeless. It’s shame that nonprofits have profiteered off the homeless and if someone would look into the millions of dollars we spent on this issue they would discover mere fraud. It’s shameful. That would make a great expose for San Jose inside to research all the money thrown at the problem with absolute shameful outcomes.

Chen, Excellent point. Destination Home functions as a cheerleader for existing non-profits rather than their effectiveness. We end up with non-profits like MidPen homeless housing that pay obscene compensation like CEO Matt Franklin’s $450,000 (in 2015).

You are wrong Ms Perry. I totally support Raul Peralez and the city no longer allowing the feeding of the homeless in St James Park. If Churches want to feed the homeless they should do so on their own (non tax paying) property and let the public park go back to being a park.

I kind of agree with you Shelly. Where does it stop? I guess we will see the census at the end of the week, my guess is the numbers are up. The churches and other identities tend to go feed them where the homeless hang out. Hence St. James Park. What is upsetting is the homeless expect it and do nothing or very little to help themselves or the people helping them. Garbage everywhere and more. I don’t have the answer. I know the police where I live have done a great job (Almaden Valley) in keeping areas clean of tents, shopping carts and garbage to a minimum. I’m glad they do it, but the time devoted to that should and would be better used in being police.

Rebuilding for Heroes Programhttp://www.sanjoseca.gov/index.aspx?nid=5268
Veterans housing incentive program that provides funds to owners of market-rate apartments to make construction improvements to their properties in exchange for accepting formerly homeless veterans as tenants. Owners of single-family rental properties can also participate.

Have you tried to navigate any of those online resources? Most are stale, offering incorrect information about services that are now defunct. If a sane engineer trying to help a homeless person can’t figure it out, how the hell are the mentally challenged homeless supposed to do so?

I think GOOGLE should be coerced into feed and housing the homeless and crazy’s as a condition taking over the city and it’s government. I also think we should rehabitat wolves and grizzly bears into St James Park. I also think the entire city should be returned to the native American tribe’s that once inhabited the area.

Does this mean that SJPD will begin honoring citizen arrest requests of vagrants for possession of stolen property shopping carts, public intoxication, camping, etc. and of those enable them by via illegal feeding programs?

St. James Park vagrants previously claimed that feeding programs are shuttered on weekends. A quick check on a few suggests this is still the situation. A ‘carrot & stick’ approach (providing daily meals & enforcing laws) seems like the best approach, but not clear that’s implemented.

Yay for Councilman Peralez. Many homeless are only victims of their own poor life choices. Drugs, alcohol, doing poorly in school, rejecting help for mental health issues all contribute to their self imposed predicament. Hard working tax paying citizens are overburdened by having to pay for their poor choices. Why is it acceptable for our city and county to decide they won’t follow laws or policies? From illegal immigrant services and protections to thwarting these health codes WHY is that acceptable??? As citizens we can’t simply decide to not stop at stop signs or not pay taxes so why can public officials pick and choose which LAWS they will follow? The folks who do the charitable work can do it from their churches property or THEIR homes. Heck, then they can open up their bathrooms and showers to them. It isn’t charity if you force people to do it. Our city is being held hostage to so-called do gooders who only are willing to do it on someone else’s dime and property. Mr Perry’s “right” to be charitable isn’t being restricted at all, just do it out of your home or church or do you only feel good about your charity if you exploit the general public?

“We have confidence that the vast majority of San Jose residents do not and will not support persecution of the homeless, and the churches and people of conscience who serve them,” Perry said.

Sandy Perry is correct, the tolerance and compassion of the vast majority of San Jose residents is a given, provided the nuisance or need is not impacting the neighborhood where they live, where their children play, where they’ve invested their every financial resource to have a home in this very pricey city. The citywide support Mr. Perry counts on is of the feel-good-for-free variety, the kind drummed-up by news reporters (reaping salary), promoted by jackass politicians (reaping political capital), and peddled by con artists like himself (reaping personal satisfaction and a much-needed sense of purpose), who’ve administer incremental ruination here under the banner of compassion.

Were Sandy Perry truly a person of conscience he would be unable to free from his conscience the plight of the good people who live, work, or have invested in property around St. James Park, not to mention the taxpayers of this city who pay for parks with the expectation they be pleasant and usable. But no, for these good people Mr. Perry has no concerns, only demands: that they endure the filth and depravity of unfixable people so that he and others like him can delude the “vast majority” and themselves into believing their harmful activities are doing good.

How much good have these people of conscious done in the last few decades? There’s no question they’ve done good spending money and ruining neighborhoods and satisfying their own psychological needs. But the list ends there. There are far more bums, addicts, and lunatics (a population Councilman Peralez calls our “homeless neighbors’) living on our streets than there would be had this city kept its focus on law and order and stayed out of the compassion business. That said, if the city really wants to put a dent in the homeless problem but lacks the courage to lock up the bums, locking up do-gooders is the next best thing.

It has enormous but diffuse costs to society but little cost to the do-gooder.

Overlay “democracy” on “costless do-gooderism” and you get progressive politics.

Because there are enormous costs to society and the “benefits” are disproportionately accrued to a tiny claque of Democrat politicians, it is what environmentalists describe as an “unsustainable” model.

The piper will be paid. See Detroit. See Argentina, Greece, Venezuela.

Providing services to the homeless saves this uninformed tax payer money. Locking up people is much more expensive that providing homeless services. This kind of approach out of anger is going to cost millions their health insurance by the hand of the person they supported.

Is the simple saving of tax dollars all you allow past your blinders, no matter that the approach you recommend ruins neighborhoods, invites additional homeless migration, enables substance abuse, and turns the decision-making for treatment for the mentally ill over to the patients themselves?

Your idea of never-ending handouts to a population whose growth and level of need cannot be controlled is an idea whose costs are beyond credible estimation. Compare that to a policy of incarceration, where the costs can be determined (and the threat of incarceration discourages newcomers), treatment administered, and neighborhoods made safe.

If compassion was the best solution to survival-related problems we would see it everywhere in the natural world, instead of only in decaying human societies.

FinFan, you hit the nail right on the head. How can we expect people to make decisions for themselves (voluntary), when they have made such poor decisions already? Too many of our “homeless neighbors” are mentally ill, and incapable about making an informed decision. Who are the lunatics here, them or us?

No study that I’ve read supports this general claim. Instead, the economic justification for rapid rehousing is focused on the EMS transport and care costs of the chronically homeless – about 16% of homeless population.
But the study was seriously flawed and failed to include many secondary costs. For example, it neglected to include police and criminal justice system costs to address “homeless” in permanent supportive housing.

==>The most cost-effective model for chronically homeless continues to be a poor farm model as Elmwood once was. Mental illness, addiction, and anti-social behavior doesn’t magically stop just because Maslow’s basics are provided in conjunction with “counseling”.

Proof point: complaints of Donner Lofts tenants. SJPD now send 3 cops on every call instead of the usual one at the rate of about 1 call for service every other day. 20 of the 109 apartments are reserved for homeless supportive housing and responsible for complaints.

If they took the bums’ stolen carts and returned them to the markets from which they were stolen, they’d be sued, represented by some legal aid lawyer; and be vilified by folks like Peralez and Jennifer.

They want to give the impression that they care. This way they get some media coverage but they dont want a mess in their front yard (city hall). How long do you suppose it would take for Chief Garcia to get a phone call (via the bat phone) from Liccardo up in the Tower if several camps popped up next to the misters?

People stopped feeding the bears in Yosemite, not after the bears killed and eat them, not after their cars were torn apart by bears, not after the bears were removed, not after the bears returned and were shot, but after people were fined prosecuted and or jailed for feeding the bears. The bears went back to being bears and not bums in the park.

I don’t believe in the communist ideology of giving; vagrants, social miscreants, drug addicts, grand-mother rapists, illegal aliens free rent in the Bay Area. I say round all of them up and dump them in Federal Emergency Agency Camps in Texas for triage, treatment and relocation.

The real reason St. James Park (a.k.a. Vagrant and Criminal Element Park) is finally being cleaned-up is not to benefit the taxpayers who live around St. James Park and or others who wish to enjoy the park. It is solely to facilitate, promote and finance the Levitt Pavillion boondoggle hoisted upon this unfortunate historic neigborhood park by; then Councilmember Liccardo, Mayor Reed, the worthless Office of Economic Development and the special interest so-called non-profit San Jose Parks Foundation. Also, then Councilmember Liccardo also championed a variation of a Property-Based Improvement District (PBID) to pay for the aforementioned crap. This PBID is designed to place a tax on property parcels within a defined radius of the St. James Park.

As to you Rams 1942, you are encouraged to read city council committee reports, attend their meetings and so you can dazzle the uninformed with your rehtorical manure and learn a little bit more than everybody who has espoused their opions up to my writing on this issue.

Your proposal is a replica of Soviet Communism. A typical totalitarian solution. Intolerance and lazy thinking advocating maximum violence as if it ever solved anything. When one believes himself to be the perfect human it is easy to propose such ideas.

> Councilmember Liccardo also championed a variation of a Property-Based Improvement District (PBID) to pay for the aforementioned crap. This PBID is designed to place a tax on property parcels within a defined radius of the St. James Park.

Here’s what I propose, to solve the homelessness problem in the Bay Area:

1) Re-open Agnews and lock up in it all the people who can’t take care of themselves. It’s going to be expensive, but it’s a hell of a lot more humane than leaving crazies to camp on the side of the freeway.

2) Enact and enforce no vagrancy laws.

3) That means all panhandlers and creek-campers go straight to Agnews or jail.

4) Give our burgeoning out-of-state homeless population a free bus ticket back to whatever their home state was. Probably one not actively trying to increase their homeless population with zero policing, free food and cheap pot.

5) The rest of us can go back to enjoying the public spaces that our taxes have been supporting, no longer surrounded by garbage and open sewers where there used to be parks and gardens.

Involuntary commitment to mental hospitals (beyond a temporary hold) was banned by the bipartisan Lanterman-Petris-Short act of the early 1970s. As a result, the mental hospitals (“Cuckoo’s Nests”) emptied out and were closed.
So to make this “house the homeless in Agnews” idea work would take a two-step process:
Repeal parts of the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (good luck with our Dem-controlled government)
Send every homeless person to be evaluated as part of a 5150 hold.

A third step: buy back Agnews from Oracle, who acquired it when they acquired Sun Micro.

The only people in the park at feeding time are the Bums, thugs and drug dealers. With a line of the finest dressed mooches. Learn how to tell the difference between a homeless person and a bum or a mooch. Two blocks up the street is where the homeless are. Waiting for yoU to do some Real OUTREACH.

“It’s taking away our right to be of service to others and help their quality of life,” What about the quality of life of the residents that live around Saint James Park? These groups give no thought to that. They only make sure the homeless don’t camp or be fed in THEIR neighborhoods!

There is an extremely simple fix for San Jose’s homeless problem. Humanely Live-trap the homeless; put them on a bus; take them to San Francisco, hand them pamphlets detailing all the money and benefits San Francisco offers to the homeless then drop them off there. They’re happy; San Jose residents are happy; The “compassion community” of all the grotesquely overpaid “gentrifying” yuppies in San Francisco is happy. It’s a win-win

Some other changes are more urgent:
1. Require all homeless to be processed and tracked through the County’s Homeless Management Information System. London’s HMIS has been credited as being the single most important tool for virtually eliminating homelessness in a city of 8 million.
2. Enact Laura’s Law in Santa Clara County as has LA, Orange, San Diego, SF, San Mateo, and Contra Costa among others. Laura’s Law allows counties to administer mental health treatment to those that are non-compliant. The data is quite clear on the benefits. Many of the officer-involved-shootings were avoidable had the mentally ill received treatment.

Also much less expensive than maintaining the mentally ill in jails as is the current situation.

Bottom line: like the water situation in Flint MI, the failure of elected and public officials are primarily responsible for the human suffering and quality of life impacts associated with homelessness in Santa Clara County.

The Big Heart nabobs want to treat the “homeless” like free range chickens, while following them everywhere with a caravan of “social services”, like mobile showers and mobile toilets and mobile social workers. Kind of like how NASA used to follow around astronauts before a space launch.

HMIS is so “twenty-first century”. It replaces “brick and mortar” asylums with “virtual asylums”.

I’m sure the H-1B workers in Silicon Valley could even come up with an iPhone app for instant mobile social services. Sort of like a combination of Uber and meals on wheels.

The next challenge will be how to get the homeless to use the iPhone app rather than using it for tinder hookups paid for with food stamps.

SJOTB, HMIS holds promise, but the devil’s in the details. Last I checked, its usage was optional – not mandatory for public funded programs. As a result, there’s scant quantifiable data on what works (and doesn’t) for various homeless subgroups. As David Packard said, “What gets measured, gets done”.